NWSL Lab
A read-only analytics view of the National Women's Soccer League. Every page renders the same numbers: opponent-adjusted team strength, a match model, playoff odds, and player ratings, for all 16 clubs on one site. No accounts, no ads, no tracking beyond a single cookie that remembers your club.
How the numbers are built
Power ratings
Each club gets an opponent-adjusted strength rating split into attack and defense. Beating a strong side counts for more than beating a weak one, so the table and the ratings can disagree, and that gap is the signal.
Match model
Head-to-head predictions come from a Dixon-Coles model: a bivariate Poisson on each side's expected goals with a low-score correction, validated out of sample rather than fit to look good in hindsight. It returns a win, draw, and loss split plus an expected-goals line for any pairing.
Playoff odds
The rest of the season is simulated tens of thousands of times from the match model. The make-playoffs, Shield, and title percentages are the share of simulations in which each outcome happens. The odds are calibrated, so a 70 percent really means about 70 percent over the long run.
Player metrics
Players are rated on goals-added, which measures the total value a player contributes across everything they do on the ball, then shown as a percentile against others in the same broad position. Bright is elite, rose is below average. Low-minute players carry noisy percentiles and are flagged as such.
Play-style archetypes
Each club is profiled on five style axes (attack, defense, pace, press, build-up) scored 0 to 100 versus the league, then labelled with a plain-English archetype so a matchup reads as a style clash, not just two ratings.
Where the data comes from
- Match and player data from American Soccer Analysis, the source for the underlying expected-goals and goals-added inputs.
- Schedule and results from ESPN.
- Club photography from Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons licenses. Each image credits its contributor on the page where it appears.
The fine print
Everything here is a model estimate. The predictions and odds describe what the model expects, not what will happen, and they are not betting or financial advice. NWSL Lab is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by the National Women's Soccer League or any club.